Excel Calculation Services Won’t Start? Here's a How-To on Making it Work

Recently I was working with a client and they had an issue with Excel Calculation Services. The user had an Excel Web Access web part to display an Excel spreadsheet chart on their site. The web part was throwing a ‘Unable to process the request … Please try again …’ error. 

First, I performed the following tasks to ensure that I wasn’t missing anything:

1. Open SharePoint Central Admin
2. Open “Services on server”
3. Make sure everything looked good there
4. Attempted to stop/restart “Excel Calculation Services” – but to no avail – Same error was still showing on the web part
5. I then decided to look through the MOSS ULS logs as my last and final resort and some interesting errors stood out to me. 

1. ExcelServerApp.ClearTempPath: Failed to create the Ecs temp path.
2. EngineInterop::LoadDll: Failed to load our engine (xlsrvol.dll)

To find these, I looked for “Excel Services Application service is starting” and the errors would directly follow.  

I ended up fixing this issue by performing the following steps:

1. Go to IIS Manager (Start, Administrative Tools, Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager) on the server running Excel Calculation Services
2. Expand the server and Sites nodes
3. Select the site running ECS (SharePoint Web Services in my case)
4. Choose the Authentication icon in the IIS area
5. Choose ASP.NET Impersonation in the list and disable it

Gary Arrington is the Cloud Consultant & SharePoint SME for JHC Technology.  He can be reached at garrington(at)jhctechnology.com or connect with him on LinkedIn.